The invention relates to continuous-feed paper for a continuous-feed printer. The continuous-feed paper is cut into paper sheets and advanced by edge strips on each marginal portion of the paper sheet. The edge strips cooperate with drive sprockets on the printer, and are normally perforated. As the paper sheets are advanced through the printer, the edge strips are removed, thus causing each sheet to be discharged from the printer clean-cut and separate.
Recent developments in sprocket-driven computer printers have sought to alleviate some of the drawbacks in the use of normal, continuous-feed paper. Patent application No. 826,820 of the present applicant discloses a sprocket-driven printer which removes paper edge strips from continuous-feed paper as the printer discharges the paper. This invention has effectively eliminated the problem of manually removing these perforated edge strips.
However, problems with continuous-feed paper and its use with continuous-feed printers still exist, particularly the problem of page separation. Page separation is a tedious job, especially when printing voluminous documents. Regardless of the degree of care taken to produce a clean page break, often times separation leaves ragged edges along the perforation line and remnants of the once attached adjacent sheets. The present invention eliminates the need to manually separate each sheet of paper by eliminating bottom and top page perforations between adjacent sheets, and providing instead a clean cut between sheets. This result is also achieved by manually removing the edge strips from the continuous-feed paper.
The invention of this application produces individual, clean-cut paper sheets by feeding the novel continuous-feed paper through a printer containing edge strip trimmers, or by removing the edge strips manually after printing.